Humanities last hope
by Johnwolf234
Summary: technically a crossover with an E book I read and my own storyline, but I can't find the category for it! with the Earth's climate destroyed, humanity launches a single craft with the mission of making sure the human race survives. this is the story of its journey, and the consequences for other races, whether good or bad.
1. Chapter 1

Several hundred years into the future, Earth's resources run out. With climate change reaching an unacceptable level despite newly-built Co2 filters, rising floodwaters, famine and general lack of resources slowly killing off the population, the greatest minds and countries of humanity put aside their differences for one final effort: Project Phoenix.

Like the mystical firebird rising from the ashes, project Phoenix rose from the flames of a dying race, its task: to carry the several thousand cryogenically frozen colonists to a new planet. To ensure that humanity survives.

The _Phoenix_ was designed for ultra-long space missions, with the crew in stasis most of the time and automated systems running the ship, most notably an AI called Vulpos, who shows up on screens as an artic fox, and automated repair drones and Nano bots that would keep the ship operational using materials mined from asteroid belts, the mining being done with specialized low intensity lasers to avoid simply blowing apart the ore. The Phoenix also has the capability to manufacture replacement parts out of these materials.

Despite there never having been a first contact situation, the people that had designed and built the _Phoenix _had all agreed that when their race's future was at stake, it was better to be safe than sorry (and dead).

As such, _Phoenix _was equipped with prototype shields, multiple fusion reactors to power the system and give the ship unprecedented speed for its size. The ship also has several meters of titanium hull armour, rail gun turrets and missile launchers, as well as nearly 100 UCAV'S (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle's) designed to operate in space, each with state-of-the-art missile's and combat computers. This might seem like a waste of space, but to be honest the hangar for the drones was almost inconsequential compared to the sheer size of the vessel; 700 metres tall, a full kilometre wide and several kilometres long, the Phoenix dwarfed every other ship humanity had ever made. The several thousand colonists are kept in cryogenic containment, along with enough food and other perishables to get a new colony going, along with some fairly heavy construction, farming and mining equipment.

As a precaution, Vulpos is ordered to awaken the ships commander, Captain Johnathan Adams, in the event of something he doesn't know how to handle or to give the final say if a planet seems habitable.

And so, the Phoenix flies.

**Several hundred years after launch**

Vulpos gave the computer equivalent of a sigh as he reviewed the spectrograph and probe readings from the planet the phoenix was silently orbiting. The planet, as with many others discovered on the long journey, had large amounts of natural resources available but simply wasn't habitable. Vulpos added the planet to the list of potential mining outposts and decided on the next planet to go to, a planet in another solar system - from what the sensors where saying it seemed habitable but from this distance you never could tell.

Vulpos set a course and brought the ultra high-yield fusion engines to full power. The ship would travel at almost half the speed of light but would still take many, many years to get there. Vulpos sighed again as the centuries old ship accelerated out of the local system - he spent more time getting to other solar systems than actually checking the planets.

The time didn't affect Vulpos in the way it affected organic beings, but that didn't mean he wasn't bored with all this.

Vulpos wasn't even really sure he _could _do this anymore. The Phoenix had the theoretical capability to operate indefinitely by taking resources from the space in which it operated, but it was over 400 years old now - one of the reasons Vulpos was bored; his program was destabilized after so much time alone and it had gave him basic 'emotions' – but even with all it's self-repair systems, the Phoenix was suffering for the amount of time it had spent without getting in any dry-dock time. At the moment, the interior corridors were starting to rust despite the minimal atmosphere, power cables were degrading and the only thing keeping the structural integrity together was the massive amount of bracing and armour fitted to it. Vulpos just hoped that he'd be able to keep the ship going long enough to get to the new planet.

Vulpos went into a semi-standby state for the journey across the stars.

And so the Phoenix flies on.


	2. Chapter 2

**_Note, I'm going to be referencing a lot of Sci-fi shows, but this is NOT a crossover because they are still just shows. Also, just because I mention something doesn't mean I like it. I hate Battlestar Galactica. And Star Wars. Also, I just realized that I never said what the characters sound like! The truth is I don't really care how you imagine them but just know that Vulpos has a fairly high-pitched, generally happy voice, while Shadez (introduced later in this chapter), is his polar opposite in that respect; low-pitched, grave sounding but he doesn't mind having some fun every now and then. Also, I will be narrating and putting in authors notes while in character, just so you know._**

* * *

**_Chapter 1 – A new home_**

* * *

**Narrative POV (Still).**

* * *

The Phoenix had arrived at the planet, and it surpassed all hopes that Vulpos had previously had. The planet was slightly larger in overall mass than Earth and also had more land area, though there was still more than enough water that water shortages wouldn't be an issue as long as the population levels were controlled. This also was something that Vulpos had been thinking about: at the time that humanity finally realized that Earth was doomed, there were over 10 billion people living on the planet. Ten Billion! Totally unsustainable.

Of course, some people had seen this was a problem and took measures to prevent it, but for once the more liberal 'western' attitudes worked opposite the best interests – 'who are you to tell me I can't have more than two children!?'

This was something that made no sense to Vulpos. Humans had seen that there were far too many of them, but instead of doing the reasonable thing and reducing population through controlled births, childbirth rate had gone _up_ instead. _Well as a very wise man once said, 'whoever said that humans were logical?'_ he thought with some amusement.

He had been occupying himself trawling through the ships vast entertainment files and found a 'science-fiction' show that he liked called Star Trek. At first he had been bewildered as to why humans needed such shows but soon realized they were for the exact thing he was using them for: to stop people getting bored; and in the case of Star Trek and other shows like it, to get people thinking about what the future might hold. As it turned out, the future was far bleaker than most Sci-fi shows had realized.

The only thing that came close was the show Battlestar Galactica, in that a small number was all that was left of humanity, but even that didn't anticipate that humanity would die to its own foolishness… well, not directly. This was also the reason that the colonists had been carefully selected as ones that would understand that population levels must be maintained to a certain extent to prevent stressing the environment, and also they all had the same or at least tolerant beliefs as each other to prevent any racial or religious problems, though this problem had been largely worked out by the early 21st century.

Anyway, a habitable planet had finally been reached, and it wasn't just habitable – it was beautiful. There were no signs or intelligent life so it was time to bring the captain out of stasis to see if he agreed to start colonisation – not that there was any real reason for him not to.

* * *

**John's POV**

* * *

I woke up to a feeling of immense cold that lasted until the pod's heaters slowly warmed my body back up. I stepped out and found that my uniform was waiting for me in front of the pod, placed there by a repair drone that was now continuing about its duties. _Good old Vulpos._ I thought smiling.

I quickly got the uniform on and jogged the short distance to the command centre (the 'captain's pod' was situated close to the control centre), which was, as the name suggested, in the centre of the ship so that it was less likely that a lucky shot would essentially decapitate the ship.

As I got to the command centre I noticed that there were signs of age on the surfaces, despite the auto-repair system. All the systems however appeared to be operational and I saw Vulpos' avatar on one of the screens.

"Good, you're awake. I was worried that the age of the pod could cause some problems." He said.

_That doesn't sound good._ I thought. "How long was I out?" I asked him.

Vulpos shrugged slightly and said "Around 700 years, give or take a few decades. It took a lot of time to find this place."

"700 Years!?" I asked in surprise, but then reconsidered "Well this _was_ a long-term

mission."

"Indeed it was." Said Vulpos.

"Well from the fact that I'm awake I'd guess we've finally reached a habitable planet."

"Indeed."

"Have you been watching Stargate, Vulpos?" I asked smiling.

"Star Trek Voyager, actually." He replied.

"Fair enough." I said. "Alright, what've we got?"

Vulpos' avatar moved to the side of the screen and a 3D representation of the world 'below' (remember, there is no up or down in space) the ship appeared in the centre of the screen.

"Slightly larger in overall mass than Earth, with the accordant gravitational increase, but nothing that humans can't adapt to fairly quickly."

Several comparison charts appeared on the other side of the main screen, showing what information was available on this planet and how well the human body could adapt to it.

"Decent natural resources, oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, a fair amount of water and plenty of land area."

A few spectrometer readings of the elements in the atmosphere appeared as well as a false-colour map of the planet showing large deposits of various minerals.

"All in all, it's a gem." He finished, the charts disappearing.

"I'm inclined to agree with you on that Vulpos." I said. "Any signs of intelligent life?" I asked.

"None." he replied brightly, before turning slightly thoughtful "though some recon probes I sent out detected what I can only describe as horse-sized wolves inhabiting both the northern and southern main continents."

"Wolves!?" I asked incredulously.

Vulpos nodded and a video feed appeared on one side of the screen, obviously being streamed from one of the recon probes designed to check whether a planet is truly habitable. The vid feed showed a couple of large wolf-like creatures with segregated fur patterns and coloured lines.

"You're sure they're non-sentient?" I asked, seeing them intuitively seek out only the older and weaker ones from a herd of horse-like creatures.

"They're wolves, John." Vulpos replied.

"And you're a fox." I pointed out.

"No I'm not!"

"Well then why are you called Vulpos?"

"Because... Err... Because I... Because I look like a fox... Ya'know, when I'm on a screen..."

"You know what, just drop it." I said "If permission to land is what you're waiting for, go ahead."

"Right. I've got a nice, flat spot near the southern coast of the northern continent. I've checked and it should easily support the weight of the Phoenix."

"You mean several million tonnes?"

"Yea that. This ship really is unbelievably massive."

"You are the ship." I pointed out.

"Oh whatever! Can we get on with landing please?" he asked, sounding exasperated.

"Go ahead. Landing sequence authorised code Alpha-Lima-Bravo voiceprint recognition Captain Johnathan Adams." I said, remembering the code that Vulpos needed in order to start landing.

"Thank you." He said, as lines of code ran along the sides of the screen as trajectories were plotted, checked, and then rechecked; there could be no errors.

Vulpos sighed in what sounded like relief as he finished.

"Finally... I don't have that nagging code in the back of my head anymore!"

I remained silent as the ship manoeuvred into position in orbit of the planet. As the ship finished getting into position Vulpos gave the obligatory final systems check.

"Thermal shielding is on full, primary shields are green, landing retro's are in the clear, hull integrity above minimum safe levels, power levels at 90% due to slight power drain from age, should not affect landing, inertial dampeners are online and grav-drive and impulse are on full. We're good to go."

I nodded remembering what I had been told of the grav-drive. What it essentially did was modify gravity in a localised area to allow a ship the size of the Phoenix to land safely.

"Alright, let's do this... Engage." I said.

"Aye sir." replied Vulpos with a grin.

_I've always wanted to say that._ I thought to myself as the ship started to shake from atmospheric entry. I strapped myself into the command seat, unwilling to risk braining myself falling over.

After what seemed like an eternity, a loud roar sounded the ignition of the landing retros as they slowed the ship down to a safe speed. A second noise, all but lost beneath the roar of the retro's sounded the extension of the landing legs, large pieces of metal whose sole purpose was to prevent the main body of the ship from hitting the ground with potentially catastrophic results.

After about 30 seconds, the ship jolted as it hit the ground and the roar of the engines faded into nothing.

"Landing sequence complete, locking down systems and shutting down reactors one through three." said Vulpos, the background hum of the ship also fading as three of the four reactors were shut down, the remaining one providing just enough power for the stasis pods and computers, leaving everything else without power - excluding life support, which had its own mini-reactor and would need to be shut down separately.

"Alright, deploy the construction bots; we don't have time to gather resources so just tell them to use parts from non-critical parts of the ship and perhaps the wood in those forests." I said

"Sir?" Asked Vulpos uncertainly.

"The phoenix will never fly again Vulpos, rather it, and by extension you, will become a disaster shelter, military stronghold and industrial area. The first thing to produce will be unmanned mining barges so we don't have to strain the resources of this world. After that, who knows?"

"Ah... Can't really say I'm looking forward to that." said Vulpos, his ears falling flat against his head.

"I know it's not exactly what you envisioned, but I don't intend to just leave you here beyond what's necessary – you're a ship AI and I can imagine how it must feel to have to stay still for so long; as soon as we can build a large enough ship, you can control that instead and we'll either man this place or have a 'dumb' AI run it. In the meantime, I have an idea to make your life more... Complete." I said.

"I guess I can live with that." Said Vulpos, though he still seemed a little downbeat.

I smiled slightly and said "I promise you Vulpos, the little idea I have will most certainly impress you, but first let's get this colony going."

* * *

**Five days later**

* * *

"Alright, that's the last of 'em" I said as the last group of colonists emerged from stasis, heading towards the quickly forming town on the road used by the construction bots, which had recently delivered enough water filters to give clean, safe water for the foreseeable future.

"Finally." Said Vulpos. "Now will you tell me what you said was going to make my life more complete?" he asked impatiently.

"Certainly." I answered, gesturing for him to follow me.

We, or rather I, walked through the corridor, Vulpos moving across the occasional screen. I arrived at a secure door and entered a code on the keypad.

"Now you've got me interested," Vulpos said through the intercom. "I essentially AM the Phoenix, but I've never even got camera footage from this room."

"Entirely the point; the computers in this room are connected to an independent power source and have been working on one particular problem since the voyage began." I said as the door opened and I stepped in. the opening of the door triggered the computers on the inside to network with the mainframe and Vulpos transferred himself to a large screen filling one of the walls of the rather large room, which also had a large amount of state of the art computer technology in it.

"What problem?" asked Vulpos "and how come this place is so pristine without the auto-repair system?"

I decided to answer his second question first and leave the first to the _other_ AI occupant of the room.

"This room was designed to operate independently of the ship, so it had its own dedicated repair system. As for your first question… well, I'll let Shadez explain."

"Who's sha-" began Vulpos, before another fox-furred AI appeared on the screen, this one a pure black fur colour as opposed to Vulpos' pure white, though they both had the same crystal blue eye colour.

"Finally! I've been waiting here 'twiddling my thumbs' as you humans say for over a century!" he exclaimed as soon as he had appeared.

"Hey, don't look at me!" I said, smiling craftily "Vulpos there was the one that did the flying, I was in stasis the whole time!"

"Hey, it wasn't easy y'know!" said Vulpos, defending himself.

"Neither was what I had to do." Said Shadez.

"Which was what?" asked Vulpos.

"Making some proper bodies for us." answered Shadez, as a biological diagram of a fox appeared on the screen next to him… more specifically, two foxes; each of which was a perfect match to either Vulpos or Shadez.

I wasn't sure up until now whether it was even possible to shock an AI into silence, but that was exactly what happened to Vulpos. His mouth flapped a couple of times before he managed to get a word out.

"B-but how…why?" he asked.

"Because you deserved it, for your services to humanity... And because I have a secret... One that I cannot keep to myself anymore and you two are the only ones I trust enough to share it with." I said, happily at first, but becoming sombre for the last part. From the look on his face, even Shadez, whom I had personally commissioned and had revealed much more than Vulpos had known, was a little confused.

Vulpos, meanwhile, was feeling rather out of his depth, which was a rare and not altogether pleasant experience for an AI.

"I know you both want to know about this, but even this room has audio recorders and I cannot risk anyone else knowing about this." I paused for a second before moving onto another topic "Shadez, what's the status on the bodies?"

"Ready and waiting in fact; I 'cloned' them - though since I did a rather large amount of genetic manipulation, that isn't really the right word - as soon as I finished, and implanted the silicon-neural chip then placed them into stasis." he turned to Vulpos, whom was still looking a little puzzled, and explained "I changed a fox's genome to have a longer lifespan, changed the vocal chords to facilitate speech while still allowing animal noises if we want to, made it so that nothing other than a brain stem would grow to prevent any moral problems of lobotomizing an even partially intelligent being, and implanted an experimental computer chip with a computing capacity in excess of 5 gigaquads. The really experimental part though is the fact that it uses very little power, so little that it actually powers itself off the nervous system of the fox. In other words, think a fox version of that boy in A.I."

"...cool." replied Vulpos. "So... They're ready?"

Shadez nodded and said "yep, all we need to do is take them out of stasis, wirelessly link with their computer chips, which won't be a problem since they have wireless built in, which will also allow us to interface with a ship like we normally would. One thing though: I haven't accelerated the aging process and since I did the implant and stasis as soon as possible, the bodies are still, well, kits." As he said this, a large cabinet opened on reveal a stasis chamber with two rather small foxes in it.

"So for the next year or so, we'll be kits?" asked Vulpos.

"Either that or stay the way you are." pointed out Shadez "I know what I choose."

"I never said I didn't like the idea!" said Vulpos excitedly.

I chuckled and said "Alright you two, you can do this whenever you want, but remember that you're going to have to eat, and probably not what I eat either; you are foxes after all."

"I doing it now!" said Shadez

"Same here!" said Vulpos.

Shadez sent a quick command to the stasis chamber and it beeped and started to warm up.

"Alright, it'll take about twenty minutes to thaw the bodies, then another 10 to download our programs." said Shadez.

* * *

**_(A.N. What? I'm not saying AI's like Shadez and Vulpos have a small file size am I? Its experimental tech from the future! And it's my story - though I will always try to stick to the realm of scientifically plausible.) _**

**Just over thirty minutes later**

* * *

Shadez blinked a couple of times before experimentally moving his legs and smiling. A few seconds later Vulpos did the same and there were two very happy foxes in the room.

"It worked!" They exclaimed simultaneously, before they looked at each other, grinned, then looked at me, and before I knew it I had two very happy, very wriggly fox kits on my lap.

I gently petted them both and they both smiled and relaxed.

"Ahhhh... Now this is relaxing." Said Vulpos softly.

"You said it." Said Shadez.

I just smiled and kept petting them for a few more minutes before saying.

"Ok, Vulpos, do we have any spare constriction drones?"

"Err... Yea, we have a few." he replied after a few seconds.

"Good. I need somewhere private to tell you this; build a cabin as far away from the settlement as possible and using as little metal as possible – I don't want any questions being asked about mysterious supply disappearances." I said.

"Sir?" Asked Vulpos, obviously puzzled.

"Look Vulpos, this has to be private. A species' survival is at stake and I have to have someone I can trust with me on this." I told him.

Both Vulpos and Shadez looked surprised at that but he nodded and a few seconds later I saw a couple of construction drones drive down the hallway outside the room and then outside the ship as quietly as it was physically possible for a construction drone to be.

"This had better be worth it..." I heard Vulpos mutter.

"Oh, it will." I said quietly.

**_This and chapter two were originally the same, but I split them up so I could upload this part now.  
_**


End file.
